Topic: Tears of Steel

Still too early for me to know how I really feel about it, but at least it's out there and released! We did the whole thing with open source software (Blender, Inkscape, and Gimp, mostly)- except for where we had to use a proprietary Sony 'black box' to convert the F-65 footage.

Oh- and the movie website. If you feel so inclined, we posted basically the entire process in the blog (the pre-release posts tend to be a bit more interesting)

Re: Tears of Steel

Well... I just lost about 2 paragraphs worth of stuff that I really don't feel like rewriting right now.

So I'll do the short short version.

After watching this several times since it came out, I still really have no idea what to think.

When I started hearing about Mango... I was like 90% sure that trying to a VFX based, live action movie in blender would fall face first into the pavement... it didn't. So...there's that. It is very pretty at times, and it's pretty rough at times too. But seeing as for the most part it looks like a cohesive thing, it's a goddamn miracle.

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But everything else is where it just completely falls apart for me. Now, I'm not the "Well I couldn't understand a thing that was happening wtf." guy. I'll admit I was that guy the first time I watched through it. There was so much happening and so little of it made any sense, everything just kind of blurred together on screen and then you add on top of that the bizarre nature of the actual story and characters and scene, and things just kind of fell apart. Granted, watching it the second time through I could manage to pick out the actual story and piece it together, but it was still tough.

I think the problem for me is that nothing about the whole scene that was going on made any sense to me, so there's a chick that's been turned into a robot, but it's actually the dude's girlfriend that he broke up with cause he wanted to go be an astronaut and hasn't seen in 30 years, and now we're in the middle of some robot war zone and our only goal is too get these 2 to make up, and then there's a dude treating the entire thing like he's on a movie set, and then they finally do get together, but then the robots still attack, so what was the point of getting these 2 together? Some vague concept of true love between the old dude and the dead chicks brain in a jar?

I spent the entire time convinced that once they finally manged to teach the robot chick...with the dead girls brain... true love, that would stop the robots attacking, and then man and robot would be friends forever. But that never happened, they fixed their relationship....and now everyone gets to be ripped apart by robots.

And I hesitate to mention it, cause it's been brought up everywhere else too... but some of that could have been solved with better actors. If I had at any point actually felt like this couple actually liked each other, let alone loved each other, or weren't behaving like cartoons characters (The younger versions), I might...might...have bought into the whole thing a bit more. But as it stands, there was no attachment whatsoever, no reason to care whether they reconciled, and so the ending felt hollow.)

Sorry...I'm rambling...

Obviously dude I mean no offence by any of this. Making any short film is hard enough, doing a full live action VFX one in open source software is bloody insanity, and actually making it and it looking as good as it does is a damn miracle. So amazing job on that front. I just think a lot of the other aspects could have used as much care and attention as the visual side got.

EDIT: Judging by the rest of the posts in this thread and elsewhere, I may have to move this post to the Unpopular Opinions thread...

Re: Tears of Steel

Visually astonishing and a lot of fun for what it was. The story really could be clearer, but it feels like even then it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.

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It's kind of funny that the ending seems to be designed to make the audience go, "OHH I GET IT. The jilted ex-girlfriend's brain was put in a killer dog robot and her residual anger is making her attack humans." As if THAT makes any sense.